Books in the New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History series

Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment-when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences-in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.

Deftly combining intellectual, cultural, and political history, Freedom from Want sheds new light on the ways in which Americans reconceptualized the place of the consumer in society and the implications of these shifting attitudes for the philosophy ofliberalism and the role of government in safeguarding the material welfare of the people.

From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance-and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.

Alter examines how comparative philology provided a genealogical model of language that Darwin, as well as other scientists and language scholars, used to construct rhetorical parallels with the common-descent theory of evolution.

Truly interdisciplinary in both scope and method, this book will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.

"The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin brings us a much fuller understanding of Franklin's intellectual and literary roots and his later influence among common readers.

Polemical Pain shows how the debate over slavery's cruelty played a large, unrecognized role in shaping moral categories that remain pertinent today.

Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.

Ranging across a wide variety of historical fields, Invisible Sovereign traces a shift over time from early "political-constitutional" concepts, which identified public opinion with a sovereign people and wrapped it in the language of constitutionalism, to more modern, "social-psychological" concepts, which defined public opinion as a product of social action and mass communication.

Because it provided the dominant framework for the "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the important constructs of twentieth-century social science. This title offers the intellectual history of a movement that has had far-reaching, and often unintended, consequences.